


An American Cowboy in London

by Jenzel



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch Jesse McCree, Character Study, Jesse meets a mysterious mercenary in a pub, M/M, smut in later chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 09:11:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12229887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenzel/pseuds/Jenzel
Summary: A doctor, a pilot and a Blackwatch agent reunite in a shaken London. McCree pursues a stranger. A self-indulgent series of character studies, exploring the dying days of Overwatch. Smut to follow in chapter two? Nobody knows.





	An American Cowboy in London

“Reyes here-”

Jesse fumbles his ‘official’ communicator and watches it clatter across the wet cobbles several stories below. He swears he can still hear the Blackwatch Commander’s voice before a small squad of Nulltropers zero in on the movement and charge across the square to investigate. With a groan, he kicks himself back into the alcove and waits for something else to grab their attention. The Overwatch activity should have been enough to draw any stragglers away.

Go to London, he said. We need to give Morrison a reason to send Overwatch in, he said. I heard it’s nice this time of year, he said. 

True, true, only true if ‘nice’ meant ‘slightly warmer than usual’. Which it might have been, he couldn’t tell with the rain soaking him through. It wasn’t the refreshing, if bone-chilling, kind of shower you got back in Switzerland either; it clung to his skin and reeked of smoke and grime. The rainclouds responsible had been hanging over the ruined streets for days.

“McCree.”

A burst of static stings his ear. He cups a palm over it.

“I thought Athena was scramblin’ these things since you got back from Japan.”

“Jesse.”

“Now don’t get me wrong, it’s good to hear ya up bright n’ early this time but I agree with Reyes — lie low, I’m headin’ back with the strike force.”

“They deployed Lena.”

Jesse swallows stiffly. On the other end of the line, Genji pauses, and then breaks the silence.

“Morrison made the call. I thought she was just going to ask him to get Overwatch involved. She thought she was just going to ask him to get Overwatch involved.” there were layers of something like anger, though lately the cyborg tended to wear his rage upon his sleeve whenever possible. 

“Yeah but… last I heard, she volunteered?” he struggles to consolidate any vision of a stable, mission-ready Lena ‘Tracer’ Oxton with the broken, babbling woman he’d pulled from the Slipstream. “I mean, Boss said he got you two trainin’ together, Winston reckons that Chronal Accelerator is just about perfect.”

“Winston ‘reckoned’-” The cyborg bristles. Jesse catches a moment of self-restraint, the hiss of overheating cybernetics. Somehow, Genji levels his tone. “We all thought the same about the Slipstream.”

Over the rooftops, shots. The thunder of a shield giving out. 

“What’d he say they were out here to do.”

“Blowing the doors off the Null Sector hideout.”

“Well shit.” he palms his pocket for perhaps a single, soggy cigarette. No luck. “Who’s the cavalry?”

“Reinhardt, Torbjorn, and Angela escorting the bomb. There are others providing air support.”

“You mean Lena ain’t piloting? She’s ground team?”

Radio silence. Were any of the distant shots hers? Sure, she’d been through Overwatch training like the rest of them and sometimes gave Jesse a run for his money in a quick draw. Especially now. He wasn’t going to call it cheating just yet.

His pistol slides easily from its holster, although he wasn’t used to the weight and feel of it. Peacekeeper, as per the conditions of Blackwatch’s… hiatus, was under lock and key as if the thought of being separated from it was enough to keep Jesse in one place. It almost was.

“I’ll rendezvous with the team, I reckon I got a good enough scope of the hideout to support. Reyes is gonna hear this entire conversation, ain’t he.” 

In another timeline, in a more dramatic universe, Gabriel Reyes interrupts the secure channel to confirm it. 

In reality, there’s the absence of Genji’s laugh.

“The sanctions on Blackwatch won’t ever be lifted, Jesse.”

“Loud n’ clear. McCree out.”

It isn’t difficult to narrow the team’s location down. Clambering across the terraced rooftops wasn’t his usual approach but jet lag, nicotine withdrawal and an unfamiliar gun… he doesn’t fancy his chances on the ground. Once or twice he climbs into the path of a hulking mounted turret in the haze. They do little more than shudder, if there’s any response at all. After the second or third, Jesse creeps closer to investigate. 

Disabled cleanly. No alarm. 

Professional enough to be the work of an Overwatch sniper, but unlikely. Not Gérard’s work — death doesn’t greatly improve accuracy — nor is it Ana’s: not if she’s still confined in Switzerland ensuring that the commanders didn’t kill each other or, worse, divorce. 

A roof tile cracks under his heel. Jesse freezes, it gives a little. There’s more of a tremble in his legs than he thought. His hands find a smokeless chimney stack and, hugging it, he trades one crumbling foothold for another until he finds something solid. Lena wasn’t kidding about old buildings.

Activity to the left, a few more blocks over. If the circling field cameras were any indication they probably already knew he was there, regardless of how put Morrison ordered him to stay. If the hovering drop ship had spotted him, however, the pilot clearly preferred to stay ‘parked’ far out of range of the inert cannons than embarking on a rescue.

Something draws his eye. Not movement — the figure is and had been completely still since he arrived, but he’d expected a sniper up here, stranger or not. They command a position a little further down from Jesse’s own, knelt and ready to engage. Jesse spots no weapon silhouetted by the sun, nor in the long shadow that they cast over the tiles. He imagines there’s the movement of hair, fabric, something, thrown into fluttering in the draft of the drop ship. Still, for all that Jesse stares they are motionless. He raises his hand into the light, pulls it across the sky in what he can remember of some wordless Overwatch signal back from training exercises — something like ‘don’t engage’, or ‘move to my position’. 

Either it’s outdated, or the sniper does not see him. 

They stand, and in a single fluid movement knock an arrow in a bow which, for its size, and for being a bow in the first place, Jesse swears he should have seen. The image they create — the proud stance, the watery sun behind them, the arrow drawing back until it brushes their cheek — brings him back to Hanamura. He swallows back an unpleasant memory. 

The arrow is loosed and strikes a stray OR14-NS unit in some juncture between armour plates. The lumbering form halts, and folds in on itself. 

Jesse’s chest aches. 

He releases the breath. 

The force that knocks him bodily into the chimney is, the first time, the hissing gust of air kicked up by the engines of the drop ship. It strikes him in the back and the dark shape thrums overhead, deceptively quiet. He grabs for his hat upon instinct as it begins to lift and soaks his neck and shoulders with a brim-full of thick rain. He’s prepared for the next one. Something throws light creeping up the walls and onto the cobbles; a much too warm, much too fast sunrise. It throws the gloomy streets into clarity; arched windows, climbing ivy, timber eaves and the gleam of the sniper’s sleek prosthetics. The glow reaches his spurs. Jesse tucks his head down against his chest, wedges his upper arms against his ears and makes an admirable attempt not to tense up before the detonation’s shockwave punches through the air.

The cowboy catches bursts of radio chatter as the dust clears, he presses his arms harder against his ears to block out anything but the snatches of their voices. Lena’s happiness is unmistakable. Even Torbjorn and Mercy report back with a certain boundless energy. Reinhardt could probably echo over the entire postcode with or without a radio.

Maybe they can all mumble something about the good old days when they look back on it. 

When he unfolds the drop ship is circling back around for pickup, and the sniper is gone. 

\-----

Jesse ducks out of meeting Mondatta when Angela extends the offer. He senses that as much as any of the hostages might have tried to show any gratitude quietly, the press had other ideas. Overwatch involvement, once a rumour, was now a headline and whipping up its fair share of controversy. They didn’t need to know there’d been a Blackwatch agent on the scene from the first sign of trouble. 

“I’m sure he would have loved to speak with you.” Angela wrings out her soaked gloves onto the street, watching the bustle of local emergency teams negotiating their way through the blockade. 

“Cause he’s that sort of fella.” Jesse leans out from underneath their shelter, the body of the drop ship, to blow smoke into the rain. He’d found the cigarette tucked away in his boot. “Ain’t a bad thing.”

“But?” 

“But it weren’t even my mission. Wouldn’t feel right.”

“So you weren’t the Blackwatch intel?” her tone doesn’t quite lift at the end, her eyes and mind are elsewhere. Command had her on a short leash when it came to interfering after local authority took over the rescue effort. 

“I’m gonna call it ‘right place, right time, just so happened to have a grapplin’ hook and know how to use it’, Boss can report it however he likes.” he leans out to exhale again. The smoking hadn’t prompted its usual lecture — which, nowadays, could even come from Gabriel if he was in a bad enough mood — but he’s not about to push his luck. “Maybe it’ll get buried under the rest of everythin’ that went down today, so long as I keep my head down.”

“Come back to Switzerland with us.”

Jesse looks up. Angela’s eyes meet his.

“If it was someplace else I’d be buckled in already, sure, but the moment I land in Swiss HQ it’s gonna be Cairo all over again. House arrest, UN inquiries, you name it.” He watches her brow furrow, and her bitterness turns inward as much as it turns towards the world. 

“Isn’t it better than hiding in Blackwatch safe houses? it makes you look like a rogue agent.” True. “It makes it look like you were serious.”

“‘Bout what?”

“Leaving.”

“Aw, Angie, there weren’t a shred of truth in it.” he’s dragged back to that night in an empty common room, some practically abandoned Overwatch facility in Paris. The one Lacroix came from. Across the street from the ballet academy. “That was the anger talkin’, the whiskey, the funeral.” he knows he owes her more of an explanation, maybe even an apology. 

Angela joins him where he sits on the boarding ramp, her smile grim. It manages to be slightly reassuring.

“But even if you did. If you meant it.” Folded safely against her back, the wings of her Valkyrie glow softly, illuminating the ends of her soaked hair in soft gold. “If we all wake up tomorrow and you’ve vanished, and the commanders can’t cover for you...” 

“Gettin’ drunk and ranting is one thing, being dumb enough to go AWOL is another.”

“If, Jesse McCree. If you of all people believe you have no other choice, please try to break into my office for a medical kit first.”

Jesse breathes a short, relieved laugh and slings a sodden arm around her shoulders, squeezing the doctor for a moment. 

“The one with my name on it?”

“I will be filling it with nicotine patches.” she jabs the base of her staff into his boot with a snort. “Maybe one day you quit and make your future doctor incredibly happy.”

“Cross my heart, some day when there ain’t no joy left for me I’ll give those sticky bastards a shot.”

“And the day you join us back in Switzerland?”

Jesse feigns a dramatic groan and ashes the cigarette on body of the ship. 

“What if I said I was gonna think about it?”

“I would remind you there is strength in numbers. And now we have Lena back perhaps… just like old times, don’t you say?”

It doesn’t sting as much as he expects it to. Perhaps because it’s true, finally. 

“Heh, that place down by the checkpoint that looked the other way about us jumpin’ the fence. I think I can still even remember our order. What’d you teach me again? Kan jag fyra öl… what’s ‘thanks’ again?”

Angela’s laugh comes out as a sudden wheeze, eyes crinkling. She shakes her head in disbelief, near stamping her feet in her soft giggling fit. 

“Did you have to look that up? You did! You looked it up just now, give me your phone.”

“Hey, I could still give it a shot. Pretty good for five years.”

“You wouldn’t even have to order, they will know you and your hat the moment you walk through the door.” the years melt from her face, her voice. “House arrest didn’t contain you back then.”

“Those hangover breakfasts, damn. Think Lena still cooks like she used to?” the smell of those fry-ups might be one of the few smells permanently burned into his sinuses. One of the few pleasant ones, anyway. 

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

Jesse blinks and looks over his shoulder, half expecting her to be there, probably posing. She isn’t, but that’s where it’s different this time. This time she could have been.

“Let me guess, meetin’ with Mondatta.” 

“His biggest fan, I am sure. No, really, that wasn’t a joke. It has been a wonderful few years for Omnic rights… this incident excluded.”

A brief, shared wince. 

“You told her about the uh, y’know, Lena Oxton Memorial Fund.”

“She was flattered, pleased actually. I believe she has big plans for it.”

“And about the Lacroix foundation setting it up?”

They both mentally grasp for meaningless gestures to give themselves pause, think over their phrasing. Drinks usually worked well. 

“I will. When she is more… anchored.”

He doesn’t argue. The first time Lena fell back into her anomaly she was gone, as inexplicably as she’d returned, for three hours and thirty-six minutes. Somehow it felt longer than her entire disappearance. After that they were occasionally longer, occasionally shorter. The anchor helped and every iteration of it gave them a little more room to breathe, save for the bigger surprises, the handful of things they’d been revealing to her only in stages. 

Angela looks back to the emergency crews. The years crease her brow.

\----

When Lena returns she’s almost too normal - excluding the part where she appears out of nowhere in a flash of blue light, wearing her uniform with more pride than Jesse thought it merited nowadays. Right down to the hat. 

They wander into the first pub out of earshot of the sirens.

“It does not make me look like a flight assistant.” she snorts into a pint, the three of them hunched protectively around their table like predators over a kill. It’s cramped, more than one passing ankle has met his spurs, but from the way Lena cosies up in the booth Jesse wonders if she was born in one. 

“It is… slightly reminiscent of the look.” Angela concedes, hiding the extent of her smirk behind her hand. Jesse leans back triumphantly. 

“Almost as bad as what they put Morrison in for that statue, what is it with you fellas and shoulderpads?”

“Alright, alright, I get it, you’re still a tosser. An old tosser.”

Mumbling a ‘now that ain’t fair’, Jesse instinctively touches his brow. Nothing more than an extra crease here and there, but there was a small chance that at some point in the five years since Lena’s disappearance he had been caught checking for grey hairs. There was a slightly larger chance that Genji had told her all about the incident. 

Angela, ever the fan of chaos, snickers behind her glass.

“The young man at the bar doesn’t seem to mind.”

Lena and Jesse whip around to stare, and then whip back round again when their sense catches up. Neither spotted a suspect.

“You ain’t kiddin?” Jesse presses the giggling doctor. “You’re kiddin. You got that look.”

“I wouldn’t! He was watching when you came in.” Angela rises up from her seat by a fraction, searching for the admirer, and comes back down triumphantly. “You’ll see, closest to the door, he’s your type.”

After a silent debate, Lena glances over first.

“Angie’s right.” 

“Bull. Shit. I ain’t told neither of you my type.”

Jesse twists around and spots his mysterious admirer instantly. The man’s attention is thankfully on his drink, because Jesse doubts he’d have the nerve to stare otherwise. 

Lena and Angela were right about his type. In two words he’s devastatingly handsome, regally so, and exactly the kind of brooding that the Blackwatch agent was weak for. It’s impossible not to notice the precision in his style: his ‘rugged’ undercut, piercings and coat are all too deliberate. Against his leg rests a large instrument case, carefully propped between him and the bar. A rich kid. 

The young man has allowed himself a single piece of flair; a torn golden ribbon knotting his hair into a haphazard bun.

Jesse turns back toward the table, lips pursued.

“Soooo… how right was Angela?”

“Y’all need to mind your own business.” Jesse feels the hairs prickle up the back of his neck. Someone’s staring again. “Besides, I ain’t comin back to Switzerland if I miss evac, ain’t authorised to be on that ship in the first place.”

"You're really coming back with us?" Lena perks up. 

"Why not? I gotta get my gun back." he barely even registers the replacement against his hip. Day by day, his instincts fail him. "Gonna be packed. You two, me, the team, who else? I ain't seen that sniper about."

Lena and Angela exchange glances. 

"I... don't recall a sniper?" the doctor's brow wrinkles as she mentally runs through the mission roster. 

"For sure? You don't remember the fella with the bow and arrow?"

"Pull the other one, Jess." Lena snorts. "A bow and arrow?"

"Right up there on the roof, took out all the turrets. Now don't look at me like that, I know we got snipers on call, always been a strange bunch."

"I believe the Commander took a risk deploying the four of us as it was. Sending a sniper after Paris would be..." 

"I'll prove it to ya. I bet they're sittin back in the evac zone right now with air support. I ain't never been more serious in my life, saw someone take them right out like a pro." Jesse blusters, sensing a joke he might never shake off. "You just wait here."

"Soooo..." Lena again. "Who's keeping an eye on your secret admirer?"

A pause. 

"Give me five minutes, I got a point to prove."

“Alright, but he just paid his tab.”

With a rattle of spurs and the screech of a stool across wood, Jesse is out of his seat. Lena snickers, pulling his unfinished pint closer and pointing toward the door. A golden ribbon flutters out into the night. 

“Hat?” Jesse pats his flattened hair. 

Angela produces the battered old thing with a flourish. Jesse pulls it on snug.

“Cigarettes?”

Lena moves first, pulling one from its hiding place in her collar. Angela pretends her own hand didn’t twitch towards her pocket. 

Just going to ask him for a light, that’s all, maybe get talking. Done it a million times. Million and one times. 

With his friend’s quiet cheers behind him, Jesse McCree follows the flash of gold.


End file.
